ED PALM | Orwellian tendencies in Gingrich's 'Newtspeak'

Isn't it always the case that you think of exactly what you should have said after the fact?

Inspired by Newt Gingrich's opening in the South Carolina Republican candidates' debate, I now know how I should have responded the last time I was interviewing to become an academic vice president and the chair of the search committee was so rude as to ask me why I left my last position:

"I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of most academic search committees makes it harder to attract decent people to apply for jobs as academic leaders. And I am appalled that you would begin an academic interview on a topic like that!"

Feigning righteous indignation is indeed a good way to deflect an unwelcome question.

The trouble is that academic search committees believe that character counts and that they have a right to examine the baggage that a job candidate carries. I wonder sometimes if the American electorate feels the same way.

But, truth be told, it is not so much Gingrich's personal baggage that concerns me. He does have a point about the intrusiveness of the media. As we now know, President Kennedy, too, was a man of the world. He was just more discreet about his peccadilloes than Gingrich. The difference is that the media of Kennedy's day, for the most part, honored a kind of gentleman's agreement not to look behind a politician's public persona. What really worries me is the Orwellian trend that Gingrich represents.

Recently, I heard Gingrich boast that he was the only candidate who could "defeat a moderate." I can understand and respect any number of reasons for not supporting the "moderate" Gingrich had in mind, Mitt Romney, but I cannot understand why moderation, in and of itself, could be considered a bad thing. Gingrich, however, seems to have redefined moderation as a vice and an unelectable quality. I would remind Gingrich that the antonym is extremism and that the late Senator Barry Goldwater was wrong: Extremism in defense of liberty is a vice.

George Orwell, in his prematurely prescient novel 1984, invented a term for the sort of manipulation of language neoconservatives like Gingrich have long been practicing — "newspeak." "The whole point of newspeak," as one of Orwell's characters explains, "is to narrow the range of thought" by "rigidly" defining the meaning of words, with all "subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten." Gingrich's reaction when, in the course of the South Carolina debate, Rick Santorum accused him of "grandiosity" is a case in point.

"You're right: I think grandiose thoughts. This is a grandiose country of big people doing big things, and we need leadership prepared to take on big projects."

As former Professor Gingrich must know, "grandiose" is not just a synonym for big. The word is principally used to denote affected and exaggerated grandeur. Gingrich obviously exercises the same prerogative as the Humpty-Dumpty of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking- Glass: "Who's the master, me or the word?"

But Gingrich is only the latest, if the most bombastic, of the wordsmiths on the far right who have cast President Obama as an ideologue and a socialist. The real ideologues are those on the far right who charge Obama with a socialist agenda that threatens our fundamental freedoms. That is sheer demagoguery. America has always had a mixed economy, and supporting a reasonable degree of government regulation does not a socialist make. Only through a rigidly narrow, Orwellian redefinition of the word can we call Obama a "socialist." And a true ideologue would have pushed harder than Obama has done to implement an overarching ideological agenda.

Obama is certainly a liberal. There is no denying that. But I find myself trying to remember exactly when and how the words "liberal" and "progressive" came to be terms of derision. Back in the 1960s, it seemed that the majority of people wanted to be thought of as liberal. It connoted open-mindedness, a willingness to consider other points of view, and a sense of social responsibility. Likewise, it was commendable to be deemed "progressive" — to be open to change. Granted, there are fuzzy-headed liberals who would redistribute wealth and mandate a ludicrous degree of political correctness. But they are in the minority, and the definitions of "liberal" and "progressive" should never have been narrowed to denote only that extreme minority.

The poet W.B. Yeats, in 1919, penned a couple lines that speak to our condition today: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."

I'm not sure what it will take for the right and the left to find common ground and to get America moving again, but I do know it would help if the right would stop using words to incite and divide us. Words do matter.